Statistics may be regarded as the study of the method of the reduction of the data?

Answer 1

Statistics provides uni-variate/multivariate techniques for data reduction. When a data-set is considered for study, it might begin with a lot of variables that influence or have significant information about the study variable (dependent variable). So it becomes difficult for the researcher to analyse every variable. In such cases, techniques like principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, factor analysis etc., are used to reduce the dimension of the data in terms of the number of factors (variables) that significantly explains the study variable. The factors that shows more variance is retained and others are dropped from the analysis. The primary aim of such techniques is to get as much of information as possible about the study variable from a limited number of factors.